


I Get Lost In My Mind

by dollylux



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester UST, Drunk Sam, Drunk Texting, M/M, Mutual Pining, Phone Calls & Telephones, Pre-Slash, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2012-07-13
Packaged: 2017-11-09 21:06:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>stars and the vastness of the night sky and of a lifetime of memories and a whole heart of gaping loneliness and where is my brother</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Get Lost In My Mind

**Author's Note:**

> the Stanford years.

Sammy can't look at the stars out in California. It doesn't even feel like the same sky he's been looking at his whole life. It doesn't feel like the sky he always sat under with Dean and his dad, all those big brilliant sparkles that were nothing when he was small, very small, when the sky was nothing but a marvel, when nighttime sometimes meant warm summer air and the feel of the cooling hood of the car under him and Dean when they'd scramble up and lean back on the windshield and feel like kings in their chariot. Dad would sit in the car, he'd lean the seat way back and stay there and watch his boys and the sky both, a brown bagged bottle of whiskey tucked neatly under his thigh nearest the door that he'd sneak sips from every little bit, just something to dull the ache of nostalgia and untouchable loneliness and too much love for one body. 

Dean didn't know shit about the stars and didn't care anyhow, he just liked the vastness of it, forever like the ocean, he'd say, just as big and impossible and he'd point out lines of stars and create his own constellations with their own legends, histories epic enough to deserve pages but only known by two wide eyed and sun kissed boys, at the end of the day. Sam still remembers the stories. He remembers Dean's homemade constellations, he remembers the names of the princes and foxes and willows that Dean gave life. Dean always had a way of telling stories that made you just kind of fall under a spell, like slowly drowning in honey. He'd weave words around and around Sam until he was quiet and still and soft at Dean's side, big, star filled eyes tipped up in wonder at it all, at the sky and the world and his brother. 

Sam learned the real names of constellations over time, of course. He learned their positions at certain times of the year and how they got their names and how old and hot and far away they all are. He'd try to tell Dean when he got too big for his britches, those aching teenage years when he would fill himself to the brim with facts and words and he almost thought he'd burst sometimes with all of that knowledge, so full with it that he'd have to tell Dean, have to spout this or that at him, just to try and coax a look of pride out of his big brother, a glance of admiration, a wondering smile. Dean would only darken and shake his head just once and sigh, lean further back on the glass windshield. 

That's Hercules, Sam would say, a flash of dimple and an excited jiggle of his leg. See Dean? And. And we're in a Strawberry Moon right now, didya know that? Almost full, too. Just a couple more days and.

No, Dean would interrupt resolutely, another shake of his head. That moon up there's not anything but ours, Sammy.

 

-

He's at a party that is raging into the night, rowdy and forever and young, all things Sam has never felt himself. He's had four beers and that's three too many for him because he's not eating much these days. Summer is kicking in, the air is getting warmer and he's getting a terrible itch under his skin, an itch for asphalt and vinyl seats and the smell of leather and of gunpowder on calloused hands. It's in a box in his mind that he's kept shut resolutely, refusing even to glance at it even on the quietest of nights. But here he is alone on the lawn and walking toward a beat-up old Chevy truck that doesn't belong to him and he's cradling that box close, he's prying at it with bitten fingernails and it's not until he climbs up into the bed of the truck, a fresh beer in his hand as he leans back and takes in the sky, the big bright and beautiful sky of a swollen spring night that the box bursts open in his mind, drawing the wind to whip through his hair, pulling the scent of unknown and out there and adventure and Dean through the air like an incantation. His chest is so tight that he can't breathe and he doesn't know why, doesn't even know what has happened, it happened so quick. 

It's been nine months since he's seen Dean. Nine months. Before this, they've only been separated a handful of times, each time against their will and time that Sam made John pay for dearly with frigid silence and accusing eyes. You dare take me from him, those eyes said. You dare take him from me.

Well now he's taken himself from Dean and it's been more days than he can add up after four well now five beers and the box in him is opened and has sunken down under its own weight to settle in his chest and it expands and expands, revealing nothing but a gaping, black hole, but eternal everything and nothing pregnant with memories, memories more important than all other memories of anyone else in the history of creation, or so that's how it feels to Sam tonight, here alone in this borrowed truckbed with Dean's favorite beer scenting his breath and the stars up above and a life that is not his own, growing up and building around him, swallowing him up. 

Our memories are more than anyone's, he thinks to Dean. He thinks it hard enough to press over all the miles between them, wherever Dean is, he thinks it hard enough to travel over broken backroads and fields of wheat and bluebells and sand and ancient mountains and rivers to get to Dean's ear. Our memories are more because they are alive and we, you and me, my brother, we are more than anyone has ever been. He feels it in his ribs and he knows it as a fact truer than any science. He feels warm with Dean, suddenly and wholly. He relaxes back on a bundle of ropes in the rusty truckbed and lets his eyes blur over with salt water. He can see it, them with their matching bottle green eyes, random lightning fast flashes of the two of them, glimpses of all his years and days before this one, before he intimately knew streets of a northern California city. He's never before known roads that Dean didn't know first.

He thinks about the floorboard in the back of the Impala, the dips and flats of it, how he's traced his fingers over every inch while laying bored and restless in the backseat, the engine running forever and true beneath him, comforting him as best as it could. He thinks about the taste of watermelon bubblegum and how it will always remind him of his favorite faded peach-colored shirt when he was ten, the shirt he wore every single day one summer while he chewed watermelon bubblegum. He thinks about a rental house they had when he was eight, a piece of shit of a house that had busted oven and only one working burner on the stove and a toilet that overflowed every time it was flushed with toilet paper and mice in the cabinets but someone had left a box of comics there, comics from the 80s, X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Punisher, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He and Dean were in love and spent day upon day upon night reading them cover to cover, over and over again. Dean still had one of them left, a tattered copy of his very favorite, the third issue of the Punisher, _The Devil Came from Kansas_. It lives in the bottom of his duffel along with a well-used issue of Playboy from their dad's collection with Shannon Tweed on the cover. He thinks about Dean trying to hide when he did his homework. He would seem embarrassed somehow that he was earnestly trying and it made Sam ache in all kinds of ways, made him want to wrap around Dean and tell him that he's the smartest person in this world and no paper with a letter at the top is gonna change that. Now here he is at Stanford and well Sammy just how do you feel about those letters now.

He drops the now empty beer bottle next to him, hearing it clink against another bottle already there and he digs into his denim jacket pocket for his phone, drawing a deep breath that he lets out in a puff. He stares at it for a long time, stares at the time staring patiently back up at him, waiting for him to make a decision and so he does, he flips his phone open and digs down to Dean's number in his contacts and hits 'message' for the first time ever. He lets his five beers fingers do the talking, his mind up in the sky, turning one of those stars into a beacon so that maybe Dean can find him tonight. Maybe.

_where are you_

Too heavy fingered to find any punctuation and anyway Dean won't care. Dean has never cared. Dean has always cared about things that he's never had to be fed from any book. Dean cares about how the steering wheel of the Impala fits into the curve between his forefinger and his thumb without any unnatural curving of his hand and he loves Sam's left dimple and the thick crust at the back of fresh pie and beer so cold it hurts to drink and the cool of the day when the heat is simmering and the sky is loud and dancing with color and everything else is silhouette and Dean loves the way their bare feet look together, the tiny differences in skin tone and the colors of the tiny hairs on their big toes and how their flat spoon toenails look. His phone blinks and chirps at him cheerily, lighting up an obnoxious, artificial blue to tell him that Dean has replied. He's suddenly aware of his entire body, the ends of his too long hair against his jaw and his fumbly dumb fingers and his stalks of legs and god he remembers that one time Dean kissed the bottom of his foot. He _kissed_ the bottom of his _foot_. He'd just smiled up at Sam and lifted his foot and pressed a kiss right there on his arch, he'd grinned right after like he didn't regret it and he didn't mean it as a joke or anything. Sam'd been fourteen and he had understood in that moment what the word unconditional really meant.

_battle mountain nv. haunting in a courthouse._

Seven words like they'd always been talking, like it was the middle of a conversation and not the beginning of one when the end of the last one was tears and gritted teeth and emotions shoved down so far that Sam can't even scratch the surface of that kind of pain again. Not yet. Not so far away.

He runs his fingers over the keypad, soft and contemplative and stares at those words like they're a sonnet or a sunset or Dean's eyelashes, maybe. (Fuck, five beers and he's a fucking _sap._ ) Stares at the words and then he's pushing 'call' without even one half of a thought and the phone is against his ear and his eyes are closed because all he hears all of a sudden is a full, long intake of breath in his ear and it's a miraculous sound, miraculous as the first gasp of a newborn on its birth day, miraculous as only real, important things are. They sit there in stunned, overflowing silence for what feels like years, unexaggerated, literal years there between them, over some mysterious waves carried by towers up there in their sky. Sammy opens his eyes again and he sees the stars finally, really sees them, sees them because Dean is breathing and it's warm tonight, it's so warm.

"Gorgeous out tonight, innit?"

Seven syllables and these are from Dean's lips, from the scratch and silk of his voice and Sam can't breathe. He hears him shift and knows like he knows his own heart that Dean is sitting on the hood of the Impala, he's sitting on the hood of their car and he's alone and Sam is alone and the memory of them stretches between them, it goes on forever and ever.

"Yeah, Dean," Sam offers, his voice wavering and young across the miles. "It is."

Sam walks home with his eyes tipped to the heavens, his ear burning against his phone, Dean's breath warm and even and intimate, right here. Right here. 

He makes it up to his bed and he pushes the curtains back and the window up and open and the stars are still there, still burning proudly with the names Dean gave them all those years before. He falls asleep to that thought and under those stars and to the soundtrack of Dean's heart and lungs and at dawn Dean hangs up, his phone dead but his eyes bright and awake as he starts up the engine and heads back onto the road. Palo Alto is an eight hour drive and his heart knows nothing else.

**Author's Note:**

> [sequel immediately following this story here.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/479082)


End file.
